I hadn't encountered Faravid Interactive before starting Whispers of a Machine, a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi detective story released in 2019, but I am familiar with the game's other co-developers Clifftop Games: they created Kathy Rain, which I very much enjoyed when I reviewed it in 2018 for this feature. For that reason, I'd been keeping an eye on Whispers of a Machine - a spiritual follow-up - and quickly grabbed it when it was discounted in the December Steam sale. Of course, if I planned this feature out with any more vision than hitting a random number generator every time, I could've been playing it a lot sooner.

Like Kathy Rain, Whispers of the Machine follows the Wadjet Eye philosophy of there being a "sweet spot" for adventure gaming, around the early '90s when CD-ROM support meant full voice acting but before the genre embraced big expensive 3D CGI and/or FMV productions, and has its roots in that most permissive of point-and-click engines: AGS. Additionally, it is also a detective whodunnit first and foremost, with the protagonist Vera Englund - a cybernetically-enhanced agent of the Central Bureau - interrogating witnesses and investigating crime scenes as she tracks down the culprit of a string of grisly murders in an otherwise quiet town. Because of her enhancements, she can rely on a few tools that assist in her duty: a method of scanning the environment for traces of DNA or specific shapes like a boot print, a biometric scanner to determine whether someone is lying, and a burst of strength whenever some extra force is required. However, she'll also develop new abilities as the game progresses, and these are determined by her attitude and demeanor: at frequent points, she can choose to respond to people with empathy, assertiveness, or a dispassionate analytical mindset. Through this system, the game presents alternate routes depending on the "path" you've set Vera on, with puzzle solutions changing depending on the abilities Vera has received. For example, as a generally more empathetic type, my Vera acquired the ability to give short-term memory loss to those blocking her investigation, disorienting them long enough to get what she needs. It's a vaguely Deus Ex twist to how the player approaches the game's scenarios.

So far the game's been very accommodating with its puzzles and directives. It straddles the line between making things too easy for you and stymieing your adventure with one too many obtuse head-scratchers, which is always a tough balancing act. Generally, you always have some idea what you need to be doing and where you should investigate next, if not always the full picture of how to get there or accomplish what you need to do. Vera often announces when she's done scouring a location for clues, handily sparing the player from vacillating in case they missed anything, and she'll regularly toss out the inventory items she no longer needs as the story progresses. There are fatal fail states in the game, but they always return you to the moment before the life or death decision must be made.

The voice acting is uniformly excellent, as is the writing, and I've half a mind to replay the game once I'm done to see what certain puzzles are like with an alternative set of skills (and perhaps to chase down the very conditional achievements, which include major missables like finding the murder weapon to minor acts of decorum like remembering to turn off a giant machine before exiting its location). I really enjoy the setting and the particular path this world's apocalypse took, and I almost hesitate to explain too much of it here due to how it factors into the game's story and how the game does a great job drip-feeding that information to you, first via hints and allusions and then via a puzzle-related exposition dump. It reminds me of the way Technobabylon throws you into its world to let you soak up the cyberpunk atmosphere for a chapter or two of its story before bothering with the hows and whys of the world being the way it is through some incidental reading of the last few intervening decades of human history between now and this forlorn future. It's a form of confident world-building I never get tired of in games like these.

It's treading some very familiar waters as Ms. Rain's first (and hopefully not only) outing, which in turn borrows significantly from the first Gabriel Knight: your investigation can only go so far in a single day, as per J. Michael Straczynski's rule of "the speed of plot," and the game uses this story-determinant day/night cycle to separate the story into discrete "chapters" - it's only after waking up the next day that Vera acquires her new abilities and has her little inventory spring-cleaning sessions. It's a structure that lends itself well to an overt sense of narrative progression, even if you don't feel like you've done much or solved a lot in the preceding twenty-four hours. Needless to say, if you appreciated the sharp adventure gaming acumen of Kathy Rain, this is every bit a worthy follow-up and an equally compelling narrative with a neat abilities-based means of adding some "new game plus" longevity to what is normally a one-and-done narrative genre (after all, once you know whodunnit, why ever come back?). I hope these studios have many more stories left in them.

Rating: 5 out of 5.